Ch2 21

If you listen very carefully, you can hear the sound of Hasera’s sanity breaking. It’s like hearing a train slamming into a band tour bus that was also carrying a ton of dynamite. Very subtle. Much wow.

With the Christmas season upon us, we will be taking a short break until the New Year (January 9th). In the interim, Guest art will be uploaded on the normal upload days with exceptional pieces from creators like Thiefy (The Ferrin), Kez (What it Takes) and Monica (Moonslayer) as well as a Christmas card special from Lark himself. Stay tuned and we’ll see you in the new year!

Speaking of breaking sanity, it’s time for another thrilling delve into…

Hasera and Lark Review:

El Goonish Shive

Lark:
This comic has a long archive. This thing has been running for a while now, at a consistent rate and has an archive with well over 1,000 pages. It starts off as a tongue-in-cheek ‘what do we do now’ kind of comic where the characters were aware that they were in a comic. Slowly, it begins to evolve into a weird story-like thing where the characters enter situations that I guess are not normal for people in that plane? They use that science stuff to explain a lot of their stuff, but it’s pretty much magic, in my opinion.

The art is pretty basic at the beginning. It grows from the scratchy beginning to a well polished art style. It grows from looking like Jenny trying to rebel and become an artist to looking like something a really competent artist puts forward.

The story, however, stays quite random with jumping between a lot of different plots and magic-er, science-stuff happening. People turn into Cursed, turn into chicks, chicks turn into guys. Everything is just up for grabs in this one. It gets a lot more focused near the mid-point, but at the beginning, it’s obvious the creator was doing whatever tickled their fancy at the time. By the end, there’s still a bunch of jokes and random occurrences. You get used to it.

This one is long and pretty random. It’s got a lot of good jokes and timing, but it does suffer from lack of focus at the beginning and that can really kill it for some people. If you can get passed the half way mark, it starts narrowing down its randomness. One thing I will say is there are quite a few lesbians. Hot lesbians. Even if one was a dude originally, or whatever, still. Two chicks making out with good art? Ok in my books.

Hasera:
I’m not entirely sure how to review this. El Goonish Shive started as what would appear to be a gag strip, but it began to grow into a more story-focused medium. If it had just remained a joke-a-day, I would have stopped reading it after the squirrel arc, but the character interactions started to dig in to me and I started wanting to see more of what the was going on between them all.

The art at the beginning is obviously done by a rookie who was learning their craft, but that was years ago. Fast forward to today and the art has grown exceptionally well. You can see the growth throughout the chapters with character’s expressions, body proportions and perspective being used at an increasingly regular rate. All in all, the art really does grow into its own style as time goes on – it just takes a while to refine itself. Not a bad thing, but more of a warning to those that want to go archive delving – it’s long and it does get more visually appealing, it just takes time.

As for the story… Well, like I said, it started as an obvious joke comic. Characters referencing themselves as characters in a story and a bunch of silly situations that don’t naturally flow into one another. Again, this was done a long time ago. As the comic matured, so did the story, characters and relationships. I won’t lie, it was hard not to ship certain couples together, though others were kind of obvious from the get-go.

One major thing to note is the cast. Originally starting with three characters, Sarah, Tedd and Elliot, the cast by the end grows into a bouquet of characters, all of which have some Godblood power, or are Cursed, or are able to change their naughty bits with their science-magic. IF the art style hadn’t grown as much as it had, it would be very difficult to keep in mind which character is afflicted with what issue.

All in all, this one has a really deep archive. It updates regularly, from what I can tell and goes from a gag strip to a more serious, character-focused story, which I do truly enjoy. I think the creator should be very proud of the fact that they pulled off a transition from a random silliness comic to a well rounded comic! I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to start laughing and then get serious about the characters they’ve been laughing at.

As someone who has been following El Goonish Shive for the past 5 years I’d like to add a little more context to the review. the comic has been running for coming up on 15 years now marking it as one of the longest webcomics around, Dan Shive the author/artist actually started the comic while he was still in high school and at various points in the comic history has actively acknowledged his limitations as an artist and lack of story planning in universe. The comic itself has also faced an Identity crisis several times which lead to the creation of a spin-off/sub-comic EGS NP found on the same website which is used to explore the ever growing world of the comic. There is also a section known as “the sketchbook”, a section of the website where Dan posts random doodles, thank yous to the fans and occasionally asks the opinions of his readers on style modifications to his art. Further in recent years due to the overwhelming size of the archives Dan has begun posting links to previous comic pages relevant to the most recently posted page in their description thus allowing the majority of people to pick a random spot and start reading without fear of losing context. I personally think its a fun little romp of pure insanity that everyone should check out for themselves.

Peace, joy, and happiness to all in this holiday season. Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Happy Kwanzaa, Beautiful Solstice, or whatever you do or do not celebrate this time of year. May it bring you happiness and bring us all together regardless of our differences, for our similarites are far more important than what separates us.

In the first page of this chapter she is seen taking down a poster of someone blonde haired, blue eyed, and muscle-bound, wearing blue pants and a bare chest. Unless she has a poster of some entirely different blonde haired, blue eyed, muscle-bound blue pants wearing hero… that she kisses before packing it away as she heads off to meet Lark… it seems entirely implausible that she would fail to recognise him. Especially when she is specifically looking for him.

If she was blind and was first introduced to his voice and crassness or something then it would be understandable, but as it stands I just don’t see any way that she would fail to instantly recognise him on sight. If anything she should be seeing Lark in people who are not him, rather than the other way around.

At one point, we will post ‘Poster Lark’ vs ‘Real Lark’. There are quite a few differences between the two. There’s also a pretty good reason why Poster Lark is different, but that’s running into spoilers territory.

Aside: Many celebrities have entered their own look-alike contests and have not won first place. While some are myths, others are recorded in biographies and some have been directly commented on by the person who entered (See: Charlie Chaplin, a man who was on TV, nonetheless).